[转]curl vs Wget

原文：http://daniel.haxx.se/docs/curl-vs-wget.html

 

What both do

• both are command line tools that can download contents from FTP, HTTP and HTTPS
• both can send HTTP POST requests
• both support HTTP cookies
• both are designed to work without user interaction, like from within scripts
• both are fully open source and free software
• both projects were started in the 90s

How they differ

curl

Wget

Features and is powered by libcurl - a cross-platform library with a stable API that can be used by each and everyone. This difference is major since it creates a completely different attitude on how to do things internally. It is also slightly harder to make a library than a "mere" command line tool. Pipes. curl is more in the traditional unix-style, it sends more stuff to stdout, and reads more from stdin in a "everything is a pipe" manner. Single shot. curl is basically made to do single-shot transfers of data. It transfers just the URLs that the user specifies, and does not contain any recursive downloading logic nor any sort of HTML parser. More protocols. curl supports FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, SFTP, TFTP, TELNET, DICT, LDAP, LDAPS, FILE, POP3, IMAP, SMTP, RTMP and RTSP. Wget only supports HTTP, HTTPS and FTP. More portable. curl builds and runs on lots of more platforms than wget. For example: OS/400, TPF and other more "exotic" platforms that aren't straight-forward unix clones. More SSL libraries and SSL support. curl can be built with one out of ten (10!) different SSL/TLS libraries, and it offers more control and wider support for protocol details curl supports more HTTP authentication methods, and especially when you try over HTTP proxies: Basic, Digest, NTLM and Negotiate curl supports lots of various SOCKS protocol versions for proxy access Bidirectional. curl offers upload and sending capabilities. Wget only offers plain HTTP POST support. HTTP multipart/form-data sending, which allows users to do HTTP "upload" and in general emulate browsers and do HTTP automation to a wider extent curl supports gzip and inflate Content-Encoding and does automatic decompression curl offers and performs decompression of Transfer-Encoded HTTP, wget doesn't curl supports metalink, wget has support for it coming (not yet released) Much more developer activity. While this can be debated, I consider three metrics here: mailing list activity, source code commit frequency and release frequency. Anyone following these two projects can see that the curl project has a lot higher pace in all these areas, and it has been so for 10+ years. Compare on ohloh.net

Wget is command line only. There's no lib or anything. Recursive! Wget's major strong side compared to curl is its ability to download recursively, or even just download everything that is referred to from a remote resource, be it a HTML page or a FTP directory listing. Older. Wget has traces back to 1995, while curl can be tracked back no earlier than the end of 1996. GPL. Wget is 100% GPL v3. curl is MIT licensed. GNU. Wget is part of the GNU project and all copyrights are assigned to FSF. The curl project is entirely stand-alone and independent with no organization parenting at all - with almost all copyrights owned by Daniel. Wget requires no extra options to simply download a remote URL to a local file, while curl requires -o or -O. Wget supports only GnuTLS or OpenSSL for SSL/TLS support Wget supports only Basic auth as the only auth type over HTTP proxy Wget has no SOCKS support Wget can be typed in using only the left hand